Floral protest by skilled, legal immigrants gets widespread attention

On July 10, 2007 hundreds of legal, highly-skilled workers, who felt disappointed by the recent "flip-flop" enacted by the Department of State (DoS) and the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS), with regards to eliminating the Green-Card processing delays, sent flowers to the USCIS Director, Emilio Gonzalez as a part of a symbolic and peaceful protest.


New Video on Aajtak - Voice of America
New Video on CNN-IBN
Floral ProtestFloral Protest
Photo courtsey and copyright - Xiyun Yang -- The Washington Post Photo

This page contains complete coverage of this event for archival purposes.

Media coverage

We received an incredible amount of media interest in this event. A good number of regular Immigration Voice members spoke to journalists from various US and Internationl media organizations about the issues concerning skilled, legal immigrants. Two national US dailies carried stories on this event as did Reuters. Since Reuters is a news agency, that story was picked up by many media outlets across the world.

Although many media organizations used the Indian angle for this story because this event was inspired by an Indian movie based on Mahatma Gandhi's ideals - the flowers were sent by nationals of numerious countries to USCIS and Immigration Voice represents all nationals affected by visa backlogs and the visa bulletin fiasco. Immigration Voice recognizes and appreciates the contributions and participation of the members of all nationalities. This was not an "Indian" effort, it was an effort supported and organized by all the legal skilled immigrants stuck in visa backlogs. Use the pdf version link if the original link is no longer active.